Inside The Score - Super Metroid - Lower Brinstar

Pulsating core

Now onto a completely different space frontier, one way more creepy and with a lonely atmosphere. A look inside the Super Metroid Ost for the Super NIntendo.

Overall, Metroid music is all about breathing—and suspended chords— a direction taken since the very first installment by original composer Hirokazu ¨hip¨Tanaka, the most senior sound related person working for Nintendo at the time and then expanded on by other composers such as Kenji Yamamoto, who was entrusted to keep this legacy intact. The science fiction, action packed, solitary interplanetary exploration series known as Metroid was meant to feel as if players were inside a living organism, the music and sound effects blending together to create the pulsating environment of an entire planet whose ecosystem bounty hunter Samus Aran is ought to become familiar with. The only two times a melodic theme is heard in the original game is when the main villain, Mother Brain, is defeated in order to give the victorious player catharsis and the ¨Overworld¨. During the rest of the game, the melodies are more minimalistic, because Tanaka wanted the soundtrack to be the opposite of the “hummable” pop tunes found in other games at that time, making it one of the earliest attempts at true sound design in a game akin to a movie, following the scores of films like Alien (1979)—a core inspiration of the series artstyle, paraites, sci-fi biology amd insect like creatures which also shares a female protagonist—and the dark synth heavy score of the film Birdy (1984).

This soundtrack from musician Peter Gabriel inspired the ambient environments that Metroid wanted to capture with its soundscape

The philosophy was: the sounds you hear are the sounds these environments can make. Those pulsating sounds as codified on the very first track of the series, the always present ´Title Theme´ work wonders to convey machinery and computers performing cycles or pulsating in emergency alert mode but also the organic component of the “machinery”of biological beings like the heart or bringing to mind such pulsating scenarios like a volcano or a planet’s core about to blow out.

Kenji Yamamoto from Nintendo continued this train of thought as the main composer of Super Metroid for the SNES; the console allowed for eight different channels where you could put samples as opposed to just 3 tones from the sound chip and a single noise and sample channel present in the NES. Thus, the era of sampling for NIntendo consoles begun.

Musical Analysis

Lower Brinstar is a perfect example of the Metroid sonic atmosphere, feeling as sounds coming from the environment itself. Of course there is the pulsating combo of low strings and timpani to get that beating underground sound that could be the core of the planet about to explode or huge creature walking deep underground—perhaps Kraid himself. You can even hear the intent behind this organic sound design when some of the timpani hits are removed, as if the creature just stopped for a minute. There is also the glitchy flute where each note is panned to right, middle and left reminiscent of some long ago inactive computer giving an error message or a rogue satellite transmitting your position. The noise sample can be thought of as the rumbling of each step throughout the cavernous ambience, as if little rocks fall all over the place with each step.

It is a deceptively simple piece that effectively conveys this breathing of the world feeling with just a few notes and the implementation of dynamics; there is a lot of volume control going on in the notes.

The short melodies are played by a pan flute in a high register, sounding synthetic, the only remaining pan flute timbre coming from the little blows that at this register sound more like little cymbals accompanying each and every note. The melodies are based on the minor pentatonic scales in Eb, with the low string playing a minor second this giving the piece a Phrygian profile.

What other tracks from Metroid would you like to see covered and visualized? Leave a comment or any insight on the series.